FAST Search Profiles & the Search Business Center

The back end search functionality for the Signposting project is provided by FAST ESP. When setting up FAST, we configured various search collections with different data sources and processing pipelines. One example of this is the content from the NHS IC site is certain to be marked up with known meta data which we use to extract important information. This content is crawled using FAST's Enterprise Crawler data source. Other content is obtained from custom XML extracts from various databases. These have their own processing pipelines which maps the XML to fields in the FAST index. With all this working nicely we get down to searching.

Part of FAST ESP is the Search Business Center. This tool allows you to get nice search statistics graphs, such as top queries and top zero result queries. It also allows for boosting and blocking of results so content experts can manually rank content that they know to be authoritative higher. All exciting stuff that we were keen to check out. Unfortunately it just didn't seem to work. No matter how many searches we pumped in, no stats appeared. What was going on?!

Well, it turns out that we were searching against the main search engine cluster. This simply performs a search against all the available search collections, but no stats are produced. To get stats you need to create and a search profile. When searches are made against a particular search profile rather than the whole base cluster the Business Center features become available.

To search against a particular search profile, we simply changed the 'view' property in our query string from 'view=espsystemwebcluster' (the default cluster) to 'view=livesearchsppublished' where 'livesearch' is the name of the search profile (i.e. for a search profile called examplesearch you would use 'view=examplesearchsppublished').

jQuery: First Impressions

Working on some UI stuff today I started investigating and using jQuery (http://jquery.com). My first impressions are positive as it makes a lot of the more cumbersom bits of Javascript much easier. Here are some examples of some of the stuff I've used so far:

Selectors

Gone are the days of document.getElementById or using a for loop to iterate through an array returned by document.getElementByTagName. jQuery makes it much easier to selected items from the Javascript DOM using the new $ function:

• To select an element by ID, use: $('#someId')


• To select all h1 tags: $('h1')


• To select all h1 inside the someId element: $('#someId h1')
  

Effects

There are lots of effects with jQuery. So far I've only used the show and hide effects. The longer winded Javascript:

myElement.style.display='none'

or

myElement.style.display='block'

has been replaced by the shorter and more intuitive:

myElement.hide()

or

myElement.show()

Also, if you fancy a bit of fading effect, you can simply add a number of milliseconds fade time in the method call:

myElement.show(250)

will show myElement in a 1/4 of a second fade in.

Utility Functions

jQuery enables you to replace the old-style, cumbersome for loops commonly used to iterate through an array with the easy to use each function. Check out the following example:

var names = ["Aaron", "Glenn", "Ian"];
names.each(function() { alert(this); });

This simple code will iterate through the each name in the array and use it in a Javascript alert.

Cookies

As well as jQuery, I've also discovered a cookie library that is built on jQuery that makes using cookies in Javascript a breeze. The library is courtesy of Klaus Hartl and can be found at http://www.stilbuero.de/2006/09/17/cookie-plugin-for-jquery/. As with all open source, the use of this library is done at your own risk!

The cookie library allows access to browser cookies using the following syntax:

• Get a cookie value: $.cookie('cookieName')


• Set a cookie value: $.cookie('cookieName', 'value')


• Delete a cookie: $.cookie('cookieName', null)


• Set a cookie value with a particular expiration: $.cookie('cookieName', 'value', { expires: 5 }) // expires 5 days in the future

That's it for now... I can say I'll be investigating jQuery further and am excited about what other goodies I'll find!